On June 17, at the Administrative Maximum (ADX) penitentiary in Florence, Colo., ...inmate number 24079-038, began his day with a whole new range of possibilities. Eight days earlier, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver filed notice in federal court that the Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) which applied to that prisoner—Richard C. Reid, a.k.a. the “Shoe Bomber”—were being allowed to expire. SAMs are security directives, renewable yearly, issued by the attorney general when “there is a substantial risk that a prisoner’s communications, correspondence or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury” to others...

...in order to appease political constituencies both here and abroad, the Obama administration is moving full steam ahead, operating on the false premise that giving more civil liberties to religious fanatics bent on destroying Western civilization will make a difference in the Muslim world. In a letter sent to his father as he began his hunger strike, Reid provided a preview of how he will exercise his newly enlarged free speech rights, calling Mr. Obama a “hypocrite” who is “no better than George Bush.” His lawsuit remains active while the Department of Justice works out a settlement that satisfies the man who declared, “I am at war with America.”

Put simply, Holder -- following President Obama's orders, it would seem -- has unleashed Reid to pursue Jihad in prison, evangelizing, preaching and editorializing to recruit those who would re-enact 9/11 on a grander scale.

The fact that Mr. Holder, while Deputy Attorney General, pushed for the release of 16 violent FALN terrorists against the advice of the FBI, the US Attorneys who prosecuted them and the NYPD officers who were maimed by them, suggests that he was perfectly willing to put politics before the national security interests of the country. He is not suited for the job of attorney general...

That statement was, quite obviously, prescient.

Remember the case where several "New Black Panthers" intimidated Caucasian, Hispanic and Asian voters at a polling place in Philadelphia? They flaunted billy clubs at at the polls until the police showed up. One of the defendants, Jerry Jackson, is an elected member of the local Democratic Committee and, at the time of the incident, was a "credentialed poll watcher for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party".

Holder's behavior is outrageous. He has not only failed to uphold his oath of office, but his decisions to act as a puppet for administration policy, consequences be damned, indicate a reckless disregard for the law and the safety of all Americans. Holder must resign or be ejected from office.

Strikingly, the worst economic hardships are suffered by residents of their "blue" states; the very same areas that these bureaucrats purport to represent. Consider the following facts.

• Oregon, Michigan and California have the highest unemployment rates in the country.

• The red states, including the Dakotas, Idaho, Texas, Utah, and North Carolina, are the fastest growing regions.

• Economic forecaster Bill Watkins notes that when the economy rebounds, people and businesses will naturally migrate to "places that are affordable and don’t have the fundamental tough tax and regulatory structures", i.e., red states.

• Blue states have allowed public sector employment to explode; and are dominated by public employee unions since the sixties. New York and California are examples where public sector employment has grown unchecked and been allowed to dominate the political process.

• These unions bask in lavish benefits that become onerous even in good economies. Now, in California alone, state pensions are $200 billion in the red.

• San Francisco has more than 700 retirees earning over $100,000 a year.

• Blue states also have allowed environmental regulation to overwhelm the real economy. Climate change regulations have crushed manufacturing companies in California, which has lost roughly 400,000 jobs in that sector in only eight years.

• Blue state trucking firms are dying and harming minority business-owners most of all.

• In California's central valley, large cultivated areas will be forced to return to desert-like conditions due to regulations that hope to save an obscure fish species. In May alone, 30,000 agriculture jobs were lost, which were mostly held by Latinos, and unemployment is 17% in the region and as high as 40% in some towns.

• Michigan fares no better. Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm has attempted to create "green jobs" for years. Yet by every measure, Michigan is dying.

• Michigan ranks at or near the bottom for unemployment, out-migration, the worst place to start a business, per capita income (from 16th to 33rd under Granholm's tenure).

• Detroit has a 22% unemployment rate and 33% of the population receives food stamps. Six of the worst ten U.S. job markets are in Michigan.

• Already burdened with the highest tax rates in the country, blue state middle income earners (households earning between $125K and $250K) are about to be lumped in with the "rich".

• Despite his "no-blue-states-no-red-states-just-the-United-States" rhetoric, more than 90 percent of the top 300 administration officials come from states that went blue for President Obama.

• This approach, according to political scientists, is natural for products of the Chicago machine. Opposition is unheard of. 49 out of 50 aldermen are Democrats—and follow policies adopted by the small central cadre, similar to the Politburo.

• Once policy is set, Daley operatives like David Axelrod begin spinning up the media and twisting recalcitrant arms to bully ahead and sway public opinion.

• But, without question, machine politics demonstrably hurts its citizens. Democracy doesn't exist in these areas; taxpayers and businesses flee the core cities, and sometimes blue states entirely, to free themselves from unresponsive regimes that grow unchecked in good times and bad.

This is the environment that Barack Obama and his close-knit cadre of Chicago hacks intend to replicate. Government for the government and not the people. Unions bosses grown obese with monopoly power. And one-party rule.

Millions of adults in England and Wales haven’t been to an NHS dentist since April 2006 mainly because they couldn’t find one to treat them, says new research carried out for national charity Citizens Advice as it urges Primary Care Trusts to spend newly allocated resources to improve access.

...It was mentioned by 31% of respondents in England and Wales who have not been to an NHS dentist since April 2006. This is the equivalent of approximately 7.4 million people who have not been to an NHS dentist since April 2006 because of difficulties in finding one. Of these, the equivalent of approximately 4.7 million have sought private treatment instead and the equivalent of approximately 2.7 million have gone without treatment altogether...

...A [charity] in North Yorkshire reported a pensioner on a low income who needed emergency dental treatment in hospital. They advised her she would need further treatment and would need to find an NHS dentist. There were two available in the area but both have 12 month waiting lists...

Supreme Leader, many young, foolish students have asked why must we stone women for adultery, hang homosexuals, flog dissidents, and suppress opposition political --

Silence! Guards! Send this infidel host to the gallows! Next host!

Errr... umh... Dearest Supreme Leader, some misguided souls argue that Iran must abandon its quest for nuclear weapons and embrace a new strategy for --

Outrageous! Guards!! 500 lashes and 25 years for this traitorous son of a monkey! Next!

Uhm... ahhhh... oh... Most Benificent... Supreme Leader... of Untold Piety, should thieves suffer two hand amputations rather than one?

Ah, excellent question... host. Remember, as prescribed by hodud, amputation of a single hand is a punishment approved by Iran’s Supreme Court. And remember a missive from years past: if thieves don’t want their hands cut off, they should stop stealing. Also, I may confide that our latest statistics show that public amputations have a visible effect on controlling the crime rate!

Uhmm... excellent, excellent. Well, Outrageously Wondrous Supreme Leader of Epic, Awesome Wisdom and Piety... we appear to have run out of time...

Thank you for watching Meet the Press. Join us next week, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Sean Penn interrogate our hosts.

Also, we have many job openings on Meet the Press, including television hosts - no experience whatsoever required! Call 7-21 to apply.

Thank you for watching and tune in next week. Now stay tuned for Project Runway: Burka Babes Go Wild!

Interviewer: Don’t you think we should scratch everything and start anew with single payer? Why not?

Frank: No…because we don’t have the votes for it. I wish we did. I think if we get a good public option it could lead to single payer, and that’s the best way to reach single payer. Saying you’ll do nothing until you get single payer is a sure way never to get it.

Interviewer: Right now, it’s not a strong public option, is it?

Frank: Well, we don’t know what the plan is. I’m for a strong public option. I think your strategy is suicidal for trying to get single payer. I think the best way we’re going to get single payer – the only way – is to have a public option demonstrate its strength and power.

So here's Barney Frank, the brains behind Fannie Mae and the financial meltdown, flat out admitting that the way to single-payer is to fool voters with "a public option". And he flatly states that the public option will overwhelm and eradicate private insurance plans.

Now Barack Obama's been saying for weeks that the public option won't hurt private insurers, which everyone knows is a bald-faced lie.

Mr. Obama dismissed the idea of a government takeover of health care, saying a public insurance system would complement, not replace, private companies.

“It will keep government out of health care decisions, giving you the option to keep your (private) insurance if you’re happy with it,” he said.

You're not going to get to keep your private insurance -- and everyone knows it. And Barney Frank just confirmed it, calling Barack Obama a liar.

Q: The other has to do with the knowledge that there will be millions of dollars of cuts in Medicare over the years to accommodate baby boomers. So the question is, does this translate into dictation of what can and cannot be given to a senior as service? For example, will there be fewer hip and knee replacements? Even if I decide when I'm 80 that I want a hip replacement, am I going to be able to get that? Am I going to be able to see a cardiologist if I have a heart condition, or other specialist? Or is that going to all be primary care? I'm calling it rationing of care, I'm coining [sic] it that.

Obama: ...My interest is not in getting between you and your doctor, although keep in mind right now, insurance companies are often getting between you and your doctor. So it's not as if these choices aren't already being made; it's just they're being made by private insurance companies, without any real guidance as to whether the decisions that are being made are good decisions to make people healthier or not...

This answer is, at its heart, dishonest.

You and your doctor make the decisions on your treatment. If you have insurance, you will try to get your insurance company to pay for as much treatment as you can, depending upon your policy. And, if you're denied, you can appeal and even go to state regulators to insist upon treatment if you feel you're treated unfairly.

But in the Obama plan, all decisions are made by five unelected bureaucrats who can deny you treatment based upon a formula, the same way that Canada and Great Britain's national health services operate. They will absolutely deny you tests, medications, innovations, and so forth -- because that's precisely what happens in Canada and Britain!

Obama's federal health board will get between you and your doctor and will ration treatments to you based upon your age. Obama knows it -- and he doesn't care whether you think he's lying or not. Obama went on to say:

We also want to start rewarding doctors for quality, not just the quantity, of care that they provide. Instead of rewarding them for how many procedures they perform or how many tests they order, we'll bundle payments so providers aren't paid for every treatment they offer with a chronic -- to a patient with a chronic condition like diabetes, but instead are paid for how are they managing that disease overall. And we'll create incentives for physicians to team up and treat a patient better together, because we know that produces better outcomes.

So Obama himself confirms that his federal health board will, in fact, interfere with your doctor's relationship. It will dictate every facet of care based upon not you as the individual, but you as a nameless statistic, a record in an actuarial table.

And if a Politburo in Washington refuses you care, it means no! Unlike an insurance company, you have no recourse whatsoever!

But we all know that right now, we've got a problem that threatens Medicare and our entire health care system, and that is the spiraling cost of health care in America today. As costs balloon, so does Medicare's budget. And unless we act, within a decade -- within a decade -- the Medicare trust fund will be in the red.

There is no Medicare "Trust Fund". They already stole all the money!

So why, then, is the answer to impose a Medicare-like system on the entire nation?

Why would you take a failed model, fraught with billions in fraud, and expand it?

Because Obama and the Democrats care about expanding their own power. They could care less about your health care, your doctor, your treatments, medical innovations and anything else. They care about expanding government's power at the expense of you, the individual, and your liberty.

Ed Morrissey writes, "...in almost six years of blogging, rarely have I seen anyone pack as much letter-perfect constitutional instruction as one soldier did at an ObamaCare townhall/protest yesterday in St. Louis. It doesn’t surprise me at all that a young soldier would understand the concepts and the historical context of the Constitution. It surprises me that he has to explain it to the people in Congress."

Depart from beautiful Sawakin in the Sudan and arrive refreshed at Bagamoya in Tanzania, seven adrenaline-charged days later!

Bring your own high-powered weapons (handguns are welcome!) or rent them from our onboard Master Gunsmith. Enjoy reloading parties every afternoon with skeet and marksmanship competitions every night! We even have an indoor range for those rare days when the weather is uncooperative!

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At night, the boat is fully lit, disguised as a Princess Cruise Liner, and Chinese bottle rockets are shot off every five minutes with loud disco music directionally beamed shoreside to attract maximum attention.

"I haven't had this much fun since flying choppers in 'Nam. Don't worry about getting shot by pirates... they never even got close to the ship with the crap they shoot and their lousy aim... reminds me of a drunken juicer door-gunner we picked up from the motor pool in Phu Bai!" -- Dan J. -- Toledo, OH

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